As the terracotta army comes to London, Stanley Stewart braves the crowds in Xi’an but finds more thrills at the secret tomb at Han Yangling

The trouble with being an ancient nation is that you are more likely to get a real stinker for a founding father. Newer countries tend to be luckier, like America with George Washington and his "I cannot tell a lie" routine, or Italy with the dashing Garibaldi. But way back then, millenniums ago, cruel tyrants seemed to dominate the business of nation-founding. In Qin Shihuangdi, the Chinese have the poster boy for maniacal dictators.

For centuries, Qin's tomb attracted no more attention than the many other large earth mounds that litter the plains around Xi'an, in central China. Then, one day in 1974, a farmer digging a well in the corner of his orchard struck something hard with his spade. When he cleared the loose earth, what he found was not a rock but a clay head, the first glimpse of the greatest